Question On the Media, and I Have a Cold

Sick this week, which is why no podcast. Feeling better, though. Should be fine in a couple of days.

But someone wrote me an interesting email. You might want to answer the person’s question:

We were having this conversation the other day and it goes (sort of) to a point you raised a couple of months ago about Bush pandering to the ignorant and making it a virtue. Its this: Does the media dumb everything down because that’s what people want or are people dumb-ed down because of what the media feeds them? I realize that this is a “chicken or egg” argument but I think its interesting.

Throughout the most important part of the coverage has been the “horse race” aspect of it, with most main stream media reporting poll numbers everyday. I am struck by what a pack of jackals the media is.

I’d answer this way. No matter what you do, 49.9999 percent of the people are going to be of below average intelligence. However, the media, instead of pandering to that, could set a bar, in the sense of establishing just by virtue of its thoroughness and quality a standard of knowledge without which anyone would feel uninformed. The TV media instead treats politics like a gossip item, concentrating on who’s up or down and avoiding the difficult work of examining issues and — this one’s important — figuring out who’s telling the truth.

As a consequence of TV media’s preoccupations, the people who rise in TV media tend to be election geeks who are utterly fixated on the horse race aspect. They also tend to be people who are fun and flashy and make the horse race interesting and personal. Chris Matthews is one of the most entertaining people on television, but his look at politics as simply a macho contest ultimately distorts people’s perceptions. I like the guy. I watch the guy. But I look at him and it’s as if he’s unaware of the moral consequences of what’s being decided.

Matthews, however, is more a benign force, in the sense that his take is so emotional and borderline neurotic that people see him as a character with a specific point of view, as interesting color commentary. Worse is that the tenor of TV news in general is to abstain from everything difficult — parsing issues, finding the truth — and to do the easy part, which is to fawn over winners, mock losers and report polls.

By the way, here’s one of the more disgusting things the media does during elections: It’s October 20th or so, and they find twenty very, very stupid people who are either so stupid they don’t know who they’re voting for or so stupid they’re willing to pretend they’re even stupider just to be on TV. They put them in a room with that focus group guy who looks like a woman dressed as a man — the name escapes me — and he asks them leading questions to persuade them that the Republican won the debate. And when the people say why they’ve now decided, it’s always for some spine-tingly dumb reason that is then broadcast to millions of people as a legit way of deciding who to vote for.